“There is no one more worthy of this award than Woody Allen,” said Theo Kingma, president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. “His contributions to filmmaking have been phenomenal, and he truly is an international treasure.”

Allen's latest film, "Blue Jasmine," has been a box office success for the prolific filmmaker and is expected to be a presence in the year-end awards circuit. Allen won both the Golden Globe for screenplay and the Academy Award for original screenplay for his recent "Midnight in Paris."

Whether or not he attends the ceremony, the tribute to Allen will be hard-pressed to raise eyebrows and curiosity quite like Jodie Foster's tribute earlier this year. During her acceptance of the DeMille award, Foster seemed to obliquely (but not quite) come out and announce her retirement in a single speech.

Other recent recipients of the award include Morgan Freeman, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Warren Beatty.

It was in Allen's 1977 film, "Annie Hall," winner of four Oscars, including best director and original screenplay for Allen, as well as four Golden Globes, in which he famously quoted Groucho Marx as saying, "I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member."

After 10 people were shot — seven of them in one incident — overnight in Baltimore following the city's most violent month in decades, police announced Sunday that 10 federal agents will embed with the city's homicide unit for the next two months.